It's not often I shed a few tears
when opening the post, not even for those unexpected bills that seem to haunt
me, writhing spectral like in the mists of half memory. Opening Joe Wright's
book The Floods was a different matter. Even the packaging for this handmade
book showed great care, attention to detail and the all-important personal
touch. It could do little but set me wondering what lay within.
In truth I knew a great deal of the
photography already, having followed his project from its inception, on social
media and via email, right through to the bookmaking process itself. It didn't
spoil the surprise so much as give me a feeling of personal investment, all
part of Joe’s careful use of the crowdfunding technique that he set up to
cover the costs. That's just the physical costs of course, in no way could they
cover the investment of time, effort and inspiration which resulted in the
beautifully finished book.
All this of course means nothing if
the content within doesn't maintain the momentum. Design is lovely, but it's
icing on the cake. The meat on the bones (to mix my metaphors into a thoroughly
disgusting recipe) is the photography itself. Having said that, the design here
adds to the pleasure of consuming the photography. As soon as I opened the
cover to find a translucent page through which I first glimpsed the imagery,
and on which are printed the words “Nature has its own order.” I knew I was in
for a treat.
If you know me, you'll know I despair
of photographs of misty trees. It's become a terrible cliché, often pursued to
the exclusion of all else. It's come to symbolise that popular strand of
landscape photography which is more about impressing others; and conformity to
the tired visual language of the crowd than any real personal exploration of
the landscape. It's landscape photography as big game hunting, and is as empty
as any trophy hunter hanging the heads of his prey on the wall. Fortunately Joe’s
book transcends this cliché despite the subject matter, or maybe because the
subject matter isn't actually misty trees at all. Because this is an
exploration of Joe’s metaphorical backyard, the ’edgeland’ near his home. And
no subject is ever a cliché in itself, it's our approach to it that makes it a
cliché, in this case he transcends the cliché to produce something fresh,
vibrant and new.
Edgelands as Robbie Cowen reminds us
in the forward (which is an excerpt from his wonderful book Common Ground) are
those places that surround us in our predominantly urban lives. They are places
“where human and nature collide...These spaces reassert a vital truth, nature
isn't just some remote mountain or protected park. It is all around us.
It is in us. It is us.”
They are places frequented by dog
walkers, joggers and cyclists, not the photographic big game hunters of the
reserves. I believe that is important, these places aren't the natural home of
the landscape cliché or even acknowledged beauty spots for the most part.
Indeed they are often used and abused in equal measure by the humans that
frequent them. Fly tipping, vandalism and other such antisocial activities
aren't rare, yet nature finds a way, somehow despite the abuse, to reassert its
vitality. They're ironically often more wild than the monocultural agricultural
land they often abut, more so frequently than the national parks that are so
carefully ’managed’ to set them in some form of idealised man made past, that
so often neglects the nature they claim to protect.
This ’wildness’ is often simply seen
as an impenetrable thicket, a confusing tangle of branches and leaves, plants
and animals. We are so used to the idea of the managed ’parkland’ that it can
come as something of a shock. It is overwhelming, dense and detailed. And that's
a tough job for any landscape photographer to express in conventional forms of
visual representation. As Joe says this “represents the antithesis of the
idealistic English landscape.”
He takes us deep into the tangle, but
mitigates this, both through mist and the reflections at the tree’s roots, it
becomes about pattern. As the patterns are mirrored in the reflection and as pages
are turned and patterns repeated, that feeling of being overwhelmed is
converted into something akin to the hypnotic.
Snapping my fingers to wake, and lend
a conscious critical eye, which is not that easy to accomplish after such a
spell has been cast. But I must for the purposes of a review find things to
suggest that may have improved the book. There's not much, I enjoyed the
company of the words in the first half which I found lacking in the latter
part. I don't know why they stopped, they just did. The guiding hand of those
phrases lent an insight and appreciation to the photos.
Counterintuitively, in the second
half of the book, as the mist clears we feel more overwhelmed by the detail,
deeper into the thicket. I don't just mean as a result of the resolution of his
10x8 negatives, although that helps, but that the land is perhaps revealed in a
truer sense. They maybe lack the beauty of the earlier misty images (stop
sniggering at the back), but we are drawn deeper into the confusion of the
wildness, it is darker, somehow drawing this viewer in deeper. It's a more
threatening place perhaps? I think it would have been a good idea to further
develop the scope of the images, to focus on details maybe? It might have
broken ’the spell’, that hypnotic journey, but it might also have deepened our
understanding and appreciation of this place.
These are all minor criticisms and
are easily offset by the sheer joy of that final-but-one plate opposite Eddie
Emphraum’s end piece. Where another translucent page reveals to us something of
the photographic process that Joe used to make these pictures. It mimics the
ground-glass plate onto which he would have focused, a wonderful surprise and a
wonderful ending.
There's more pics below.
